


Fallen Angel

by Ladybug_21



Category: Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire - Elizabeth Wein
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 23:19:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8597710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: By all official accounts, the war ended in 1945.  But it wasn't really over, not for Anna Engel and for all the people she had encountered throughout its course.  A series of letters — sent and unsent — explores what became of Anna Engel between and after the books.  Spoilers for both Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire.





	1. Anna - Berlin, January 1944

**Author's Note:**

> All rights and characters belong to Elizabeth Wein.

Berlin  
  
4\. January 1944

Liebe Julie,

I’ve really lost it, haven’t I.

It’s funny, I _thought_ that I had really lost it when I did everything that I did at the end of last year, but somehow committing treason for the sake of a bunch of French Résistance fighters doesn’t seem nearly as insane to me as writing to someone who’s dead. I guess I can justify the espionage with principle; this, meanwhile, is just me not knowing how to write down everything I’m thinking without pretending that you’ll read it, like I read all of the pages upon pages that you wrote. As you know, I’m not a student of literature and I sure as hell am not a writer. Letters and lab reports are about all that I can do.

I’m back in Berlin, which is both the right move and a complete nightmare. I’m positive that, if I were still in Ormaie, I’d be haunted even more often by the memories that still sneak up on me at the most unexpected moments throughout the day. At the same time, though, your RAF and the Americans have done an impressive job of decimating our capital with frequent air raids. I’ve almost gotten used to stepping over lifeless bodies and bloodied, stiff limbs protruding from rubble, as I walk to work in the mornings. As the local secretary for a top military commander, they will move me to new accommodations every time my apartment is destroyed by another raid, but I lie awake at night thinking about the bewildered, dirty children that wander the streets with dead eyes, numb to the corpses around them. (I’m sure London is the same. This war is killing all of us in equal measure.) Everything is about a thousand times worse for those kids than it is for me, but I don’t have a clue how to help any of them, and it makes me hate myself and just about everything else in this world. 

I can’t really reconcile this city around me with the Berlin that I knew before the war, the Berlin in which I spent my childhood. But, then, I can’t really reconcile the country around me with the Germany that I knew before the Nazis. You once referred to my homeland as _das Land der Dichter und Denker_. Goethe and Kant wouldn’t even recognize the place nowadays, we’ve fucked it up so badly.

I’m sorry, I’m just scribbling nonsense now. Returning to Berlin has proven more of a shock than I had expected, but it’s still better than it would have been to stay in Ormaie. Unlike you, Julie, I truly am a coward.

You see, the deaths of those who died in Ormaie weigh heavily on me — yours, Marie’s, and, hypocrite that I am, SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden’s. I knew that Maddie would tell your story, once she made it back home. I also knew that I would never again have the bravery to contact the Résistance and tell them about their lost ones — how could I, when I was so complicit, a bystander who did nothing more than turn away in revulsion until after too many were dead? But there was one person who deserved to know the truth, and I knew how to contact her, so I did.

The expensive Swiss school had sent Isolde von Linden home for Christmas by the time my telegram arrived. Or, perhaps I should say, had sent Isolde von Linden to her relatives, not back to Berlin, where she had grown up. Her mother was dead, I learned, and with her father dead as well now, she had been returned to her only living aunt in Düsseldorf. It took some convincing before the headmistress gave me the address, and then even more convincing for the military’s logistics coordinator to agree to route my travel to Berlin through Düsseldorf — _three whole packets_ of cigarettes, and Düsseldorf isn’t even that out of the way! Especially since, with all of the trains to and from Ormaie out of service

God.

I’m sorry, Julie. I’m so sorry about everything. I don’t know what more I could have done, but it doesn’t keep me from feeling guilty as hell about it all. (And now I’ve gone and smudged up half of what I’ve written. Stupid tears. I can’t even write a proper letter, apparently.)

The point being, it’s completely my fault that the bridge over the Poitou between Poitiers and Tours was blown up. So I can’t complain about that the fact that it took me three buses to get from France back to Germany — Ormaie to Paris, Paris to Brussels, and Brussels to Düsseldorf the next day.

I reached Düsseldorf in the early afternoon, as all of the remaining church bells along the Rhine were clanging the hour. Even though they were all ringing in different keys, the racket somehow sounded better than you would expect — sort of beautiful, even though it shouldn’t have. It was a biting but clear winter day, so I wrapped my scarf around my neck a little tighter and walked along the promenade towards the bridge that would take me across the river to Oberkassel. When I got tired of carrying my suitcase, I sat down on a bench facing the water and ate the margarine sandwich I’d brought with me, watching the citizens of the city. A mother pushed her baby in a buggy while shouting at another young child not to run too close to the edge of the water. An old man sat on a bench to my right, reading a book with fierce determination. Two girls around your age walked hand in hand, whispering secrets to each other. (Is this what you and Maddie would be doing, if the war were over and you were back in Britain, carefree and alive?) I couldn’t help but admire how each worked so hard to maintain the façade that there was no war, that this was just a typical Saturday in Düsseldorf.

I confess, I stood outside of Isolde von Linden’s new home for quite some time after I arrived. It was one of those beautiful old houses with oriel windows that are so common in this part of Düsseldorf, painted a peeling dark red between two equally battered white façades. The inhabitants of the neighborhood clearly had been impacted by the war as much as anyone in Europe has, but Oberkassel felt so much calmer than the chaos in Berlin, or the terror of Ormaie. Would my presence cause as much damage as a bomb, I wondered, if I knocked on the door and tell v.L.’s daughter what I knew?

In the end, I didn’t really get to choose what to do. As I stood staring indecisively at the house, I noticed a girl in one of the windows, staring solemnly down at me. I froze, unsure of myself, then breathed a sigh of relief when she moved away from the window. A moment later, though, she was at the door of the house, frowning at me.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

It was clear to me from the moment she opened her mouth that she was her father’s daughter. She has v.L.’s soft, reed-like voice, like a quiet solo played on an oboe. But beneath the softness is something unbreakable, something that assumes it has authority and will be obeyed. The similarity was jarring, as was the familiar way she narrowed her eyes ever so slightly in suspicion.

“Isolde?” I heard myself say. “My name is Anna Engel. I worked for your father in France.”

Something almost imperceptible shifted behind Isolde’s eyes, which widened and grew unfocused. In a moment, she went from being the disdainful offspring of an SS-Hauptsturmführer to a young girl still deeply mourning the loss of a parent.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, “I didn’t mean to upset you...”

“You knew Papa?” she breathed shakily. 

“Yes,” I answered, “and I have a few things of his that I wanted to return to you.”

She studied me for a moment, then nodded and pushed the door open a little wider.

“Please, come in.”

The inside of the house was as seemingly untouched by the war as its exterior — tasteful and expensive, but old-fashioned. Isolde, slight and pale and so young, looked out of place amongst its ornately carved furniture, upholstered in jewel-toned silks, which belonged to some extravagant era from before the Great War. A small grand piano with yellowing ivory keys stood in one corner of the room, near the window, where sunlight fell across the sheet music on its stand. All of the lights in the room were turned off. Isolde led me to the two chairs nearest the piano and invited me to sit down in one of them. While she rushed off to fetch water for both of us, I noticed a book of poems lying on the seat of her chair, where I can only assume she had been reading in another patch of sunlight before she noticed me outside. 

It made me suddenly very sad, that this poor young girl was trapped in a dark old house like this, like a flower struggling to find enough warmth and light to survive. _Isolde noch im Reich der Sonne!_ I thought to myself. Her father would be so disappointed.

“Here you are,” said Isolde, bursting back into the room and thrusting a glass of water into my hands.

“Heine?” I asked, gesturing towards her book of poetry.

Isolde flushed.

“I know I shouldn’t,” she mumbled, “but how can one resist? Even Papa, who is the most law-abiding person I know, turned pale with horror at the thought of having to burn his record of [_Dichterliebe_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZLjf_m6j0A)! You won’t tell anyone, will you?” she added suddenly, cradling her own glass of water protectively in her hands and looking horribly vulnerable.

I could have laughed. This girl, no doubt raised in the most rigid of households, thought her little act of subterfuge amounted to something worthy of serious punishment. I constructed an imaginary scale, placed her little book of forbidden poems and her father’s record of a banned Schumann song cycle on one side, and then began to load the other with my own crimes against the Reich: a flurry of disorganized cards scrambled at the bottom of a bag of laundry; the impression of a key in the bottom of a perfectly milled bar of American soap; a curl of cigarette smoke twisting from between the lips of a fearless Scottish spy; a vial of stolen morphine jabbed into the arm of a shaking Polish girl who, nearly delirious with fever and groaning with pain, still cursed my name from between gritted teeth. The scale flung Heine to the heavens as it measured the weight of my treachery, and the thought made me smile bitterly.

“I won’t tell a soul, of course not,” I reassured her, and clinked my glass against hers. “ _Prost_.” 

Isolde smiled a flickering little ghost of a smile and sat down, perching on the edge of her chair like a bird about to take flight. I thought about telling her about her father and _Le Silence de la Mer_ , but decided against it for the moment. 

“Do you play?” I asked, gesturing to the piano. (The music open on the stand was a [Brahms intermezzo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSyEvSL200o) — good Germanic music by a patriotic Christian composer, nothing controversial in the slightest.)

“Oh, only a little,” she confessed. “And not as well as I should. It’s really Papa who plays. Played,” she corrected herself, her bottom lip trembling.

“He was a musician, then? I knew he sang.”

“Oh, he sang for you, then?” Isolde sounded so delighted that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I personally had not heard v.L.’s impromptu interpretation of Tristan. “He had such a lovely voice. He wanted to be a singer when he was younger, you know.”

“Did he?” I thought about coldhearted v.L. — who, according to a gleeful Étienne Thibaut, had barely flinched upon witnessing Jacques’s fingers being snapped one after the other, slowly, for maximum effect — and tried to imagine him singing tender arias to corseted ingénues on stages across Europe. You won’t be surprised to know that I simply couldn’t manage such a mental image. “What happened?”

“Oh, the war.” Isolde sighed. “Not this war — the last war. Papa was conscripted to fight on the Russian front, and Mama always said he wasn’t the same afterwards. He tried to go to music conservatory in Vienna, but he couldn’t cope, so he came back home to Berlin, and, when he was well enough, began teaching literature at a boys’ school. He eventually became the headmaster, and was apparently very good at it. His colleagues and students all said he prided himself on having absolute control over everything that happened at the school.”

That last bit sounded familiar, at least, even if none of the rest of it did. 

“So he never went back to singing,” I finished.

Isolde shook her head.

“Except for us, in the evenings,” she said, a wistful smile spreading over her face. “For friends, occasionally. He could sing bits and pieces of almost any opera you could name. And he made up parodies of famous arias, for people’s birthdays and such. Papa had such a wonderful sense of humor.”

It’s a good thing Isolde was lost in her memories at that moment, Julie, because I was gobsmacked, as you Brits say. Of all of the things she had said so far about v.L. and his improbable operatic aspirations, this mention of his sense of humor was the hardest to believe. 

“I had no idea he was so talented,” I said finally.

“Oh, he was very clever!” cried Isolde. “Mama always said he had the soul of a poet. I know he wrote her love poems, which she never showed me, and which probably went up in flames when the house was bombed. And he made up little rhyming songs for me when I was small, to tunes from Mozart operas, to help me remember the street where we lived and what his school’s telephone number was, in case I got lost somewhere in the city.” 

She hummed a line or two from a [duet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfti-KQoxXM) from _Don Giovanni_ , clearly remembering to herself nonsense lyrics from her childhood that were too private a memory to share completely. (I may not have the same knowledge of literature that you and v.L. shared, Julie, but my grandmother almost never turned off her gramophone when I was growing up, so I have a much more extensive overview of music.)

I raised an eyebrow, bemused. 

“Not tunes from Wagner operas?”

Isolde granted me a quivering little smile. 

“Papa loved Wagner, obviously, but he would be the first to admit that Mozart is much more melodically memorable. Besides, Mozart was his favorite composer.”

“Really. Because of his name?”

Isolde actually laughed aloud at this.

“Do you know, that actually wasn’t Papa’s name? I mean, it wasn’t Mozart’s either, to be fair. Papa’s given name was Gottlieb, but he hated it, and when he was seventeen, he marched down to the city hall and demanded that his name be legally changed to Amadeus, which, he argued, was the same thing but in a more poetic language. He always says — said — that he only named me Isolde because Mama wouldn’t let him name me Pamina or Konstanze.” 

Pamina or Konstanze: Both beautiful girls who were defiant captives, threatened with torture, but insistent that they would rather die than submit to the will of their wardens. Isolde has hair the same flaxen-gold as yours, Julie. I suddenly desperately wanted a cigarette.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” I asked Isolde, who shook her head, and then shook her head again when I offered one of my few cigarettes that had avoided being bartered off. I lit up with practiced ease and exhaled a long, calming plume of smoke very slowly, glad that my hands were not shaking. 

“Do you mind if I put on a record?” she asked me, in return. “I know it sounds silly, but my aunt never lets me. I don’t even know why she owns a gramophone. She feels it’s morally frivolous to listen to music with so many people dying every day, but she’s out for the afternoon, and what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

“Please.” 

I watched Isolde as she searched through the records on the shelf with a slight frown on her face, until she finally pulled one from the stack, gave it a solemn nod of approval, and set it on the turntable. As she dropped the needle into one of the grooves and the music crackled into life, I expected to hear the opening chords to “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” but I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that Isolde’s strict aunt had obligingly disposed of any recordings of _Dichterliebe_ that she had once possessed.

“ _Don Giovanni_?” I hazarded. (It was something Mozart and fluttering and Italian, but didn’t sound like what I remembered of _Così fan tutte_.)

She shook her head.

“ _Figaro_ ,” she replied. “This bit coming up was what Papa always put on when he was having a stressful time at work. He said it cheered him up enough to keep him from growling at me all through dinner. Papa always hated being cross in front of me, and he almost never was.”

There was a sputtering pause in the [music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2yrDWEoCpc), and then a long soulful line sung by a deep bass voice. _Contessa, perdono, perdono, perdono..._ The unfaithful Count begging his wife for forgiveness at the end of the story, when he has just refused to absolve the wrongdoing of everyone else.

And then Isolde began to sing along with the Countess, in a soft, clear, crystalline voice that pierced straight to my heart. _Più docile io sono, e dico di sì, e dico di sì_. I am more docile, and I say yes.

Should it have surprised me, Julie, to find my eyes filling with tears at such a moment? There seems to be so little beauty left in the world these days, and yet here was a quiet, simple example of everything our lives in Ormaie lacked – music, hope, and forgiveness. It’s all so easy in Mozart’s farce; the wicked who repent are forgiven and accepted with open arms by those they have offended, and life goes on. _Ah, tutti contenti saremo così_.

The end of the war will not be that easy. I keep asking myself if v.L. was brave to put a bullet in his brain, or a coward to do so. The more I think about it, the more I think he was even more of a coward than I am. Isolde, still in the realm of the sun, shielded from reality behind the mountains of neutral Switzerland, had been told that her father had died as the result of an explosion at the Gestapo headquarters in Ormaie. (I know, because I sent the telegram.) This was technically true. But I know that Amadeus von Linden had given up all hope of forgiveness and was fleeing from some justice that he knew he could not avoid. I sensed that most of his men assumed that his suicide resulted from shame over the destruction of his headquarters, and from fear that he would be demoted or fired or even executed for his failure in Ormaie, and I can only guess that that must be partially true. But as one of the few who knew about how you had operated him, had charmed him, had laden him with doubt and guilt for his actions, I think he was also fleeing from himself. 

I know how that feels. God, Julie, I know what it means to want to flee from yourself. A friend took me to see a production of _Richard III_ when I was in Chicago, and I now understand completely what Richard meant when he said that. I’ve done things that I can’t forgive myself for doing, and Ormaie actually isn’t one of them, even if it’s left me with v.L.’s blood on my hands. Ironically, if the Allies win, Ormaie may be the only thing that saves me from all of the shit that I’ve done in the service of the Reich. But even then, I can’t expect to be forgiven easily by the victors. The Allies are not led by Countesses who can forgive in five brief measures of music. If Countesses governed the world, perhaps we wouldn’t even be in this war, in the first place. 

As I grappled with this odd combination of catharsis and despair, I slowly realized that Isolde, too, was weeping. I brusquely wiped my tears away with the back of my hand as the opera finished with an exuberant flourish that seemed wholly out of place with how melancholy I suddenly felt. Isolde timidly sat back down in her own chair, again on the very edge, as if afraid she would be swallowed alive by the cushions if she leaned back. 

“I’m so glad that you came to visit, Fräulein Engel,” she said quietly. “I can’t talk to my aunt about music, or about Papa, really, and it’s made things awfully lonely here in Düsseldorf.”

“Well, at least you’ll be going back to school soon,” I reminded her, but she shook her head.

“We can’t afford it,” she explained.

I was about to protest that Isolde’s despicable aunt could sell some of her outrageous furniture to pay for her niece’s schooling, or at least to get her out of Rheinland where she might be bombed to death any day, but decided that it was none of my business. (Except that it _was_ my business, because it was my fault that Amadeus von Linden had shot himself in the head and was no longer receiving a paycheck for torturing poor French boys all day long.) _Isolde jetzt im Reich der Schatten!_ I improvised to myself. Everything that she had known had been taken from her — parents, house, school, friends, even the right to play Mozart on the gramophone when she wanted — and now she was terrifyingly alone in Düsseldorf, a city that was trying so desperately on a Saturday afternoon in January 1944 to pretend that there wasn’t a war on.

“Tell me about Papa in France,” she asked me suddenly, and I quickly stuffed my cigarette in my mouth to avoid having to answer.

“Your Papa in France,” I repeated after a moment, sighing a silver cloud of smoke and stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray on the table between us. “What do you want to know?” 

“What he was like. What he did there.” She shrugged, trying to appear more casual than she obviously felt. “How he got on with everyone. How... how he died.”

There’s a reason I’m writing this fake letter to you, Julie. I like to believe that you, of all people, can understand the importance and _necessity_ of telling a carefully constructed truth. But, when I’m honest with myself, I cringe to think of what you would say if you could read this. _Fräulein Anna Engel, M d M – Mädchen des Mensonges. Anna the Alchemical Angel_ , turning steel pins and iron shackles into gold.

I had come to Düsseldorf to tell Isolde the truth about her father’s life and death. But I am a coward. I looked at the poor girl, who had lost everything except for her beautiful memories of her clever, talented Papa, who hated being cross in front of her during dinner because of work. And I realized that this was truly why Amadeus von Linden had killed himself: He did not _ever_ want to have to tell Isolde the truth of what he had done. I had all but convinced myself that it was my duty to tell her, but sitting face-to-face with Isolde, the calculus changed. She hadn’t asked for any of this, she had virtually no one left in the world, and the war had already been so unfair to so many innocent people. And what right did I have to take those small scraps of comforting memories from her, as well? 

“He was in charge of everything that happened at the headquarters in Ormaie,” I said finally. “He made a lot of important decisions concerning everyone there, and he was widely respected.”

It’s true, Julie. His men were scared to death of him, but they all wanted him to be pleased with their work, too. You more or less said yourself that while you hated and feared v.L., you did respect his intellect. I can’t say the same for the French prisoners, but then, I never had the chance to ask them for their candid opinion of SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden. So I have told the truth.

Isolde nodded, as if this information did not surprise her. (It really shouldn’t have — it was extremely generic.) She waited for me to go on. I racked my brain for more specific positive instances.

“We worked out of a big hotel in Ormaie. The Château de Bordeaux. It was a beautiful building. Your Papa’s office was on the ground floor, in a grand old parlor with a Venetian glass chandelier. He once invited a journalist in to conduct an interview there, with a young spy who had been compiling a report for us, and I sat in as a translator.” 

I’ve learned well from you, Julie. _Careless talk costs lives_. I purposefully omitted any damning national adjectives, letting Isolde presume what she would. But I have told the truth.

“There was a man who worked with us, a local man whose family was Alsatian and spoke German. They hosted our staff for dinner at their farm several times while I was there, and your Papa became fast friends with the youngest daughter of the household, a little girl of probably ten or eleven. He would bring her small presents when we visited. I’m sure he was thinking of you when he did so.”

There was no need to mention that the family’s hospitality was not voluntary, nor that they had harbored the orchestrators of her father’s final humiliation. And Isolde didn’t need to know that only a few weeks ago, I had pretended to scold that same little girl on the Place des Hirondelles, so that I could march her off the square as if in search of her brother, only to then ask her to deliver this message to an English spy named Kittyhawk: Isolde’s father found shot through the head, a suspected suicide. So I have told the truth.

“That sounds just like Papa,” breathed Isolde. “And the explosion?”

I could have told her that I was responsible, that I had provided the Résistance with a narrative map of the headquarters and a key with which to enter, that I had scrawled treason in red ink and smudged an incriminating archival number into an innocent blur and written secret messages in invisible ink on silk scarves. I could have told her that her father was a terrifying bastard who watched calmly as brands were pressed into bare skin or pins threaded through tender flesh; that he was an idiot fascist and an exemplary servant of the Third Reich, in every detail except for his determination to save an extremely guilty and utterly beguiling Scottish spy; that he never let me touch so much as a _drop_ of alcohol all through my time in his service because I was his driver (and God knows I could have used alcohol to erase some of the things that I saw). That I regretted having his blood on my hands, but I didn’t regret in the slightest that he was good and dead.

“It happened while the British were bombing Ormaie,” I said instead, shaking my head. “I wasn’t there.”

I have told the truth.

Every goddamn word was the truth. 

Isolde was crying again. I would have reached out and hugged her like she deserved, but the most painfully German part of me couldn’t quite manage that extravagant a display of affection for a total stranger. Instead, I fished about in a pocket of my bag until I located v.L.’s gold signet ring with its tiny sapphire, as well as a small framed picture of him and a much younger Isolde that had been found on the windowsill of his bedroom. I had asked the police officers and coroners to leave them with me when they were done with their investigation of the scene of apparent suicide, and now I pressed them both into Isolde’s trembling hands. 

“Here’s one more thing about your father that I know was true,” I said, and I didn’t need to fabricate this part in the slightest. “He loved you very, very much, and he wanted you to be proud of every decision that he made for the sake of Germany.” 

Isolde nodded, and gulped, and nodded again. I handed her her glass of water, which she sipped gratefully. We sat in silence for what seemed like hours, the gramophone still chuffing steadily where Isolde had left the turntable spinning. Amadeus von Linden’s six calfskin notebooks, filled with descriptions of his vicious interrogations of French Résistance fighters, remained in my suitcase.

An ancient grandfather clock chimed from the shadows in the corner of the room. It was later than I’d realized.

“I should be going,” I said. 

“Oh, must you?” cried Isolde, springing to her feet.

“I start a new job in Berlin tomorrow,” I explained apologetically.

Isolde nodded, and led the way to the door of the house.

“I’m glad you came,” she repeated on the doorstep.

I wish I could have said the same, but I was so torn over my cowardice that “Take care” was all that I could manage in return. We shook hands formally. And then I turned away and did not look back, although I could have sworn I heard the first dreaming piano chords of _Dichterliebe_ trail along behind me as I walked slowly back towards the Altstadt. My suitcase was still laden with v.L.’s hideous records of torture, but even then, it somehow was infinitely lighter than the guilt that I carried with me away from Isolde’s aunt’s house. 

The train tracks between Düsseldorf and Berlin had been bombed (predictably), so my assigned transit was a lift from a munitions maker whose factory — or what was left of it, after so many targeted air raids — was in the Ruhrgebiet. It was perhaps six or seven hours by car, and the roads were often so damaged that we had to cross through fields to pass. My driver was a kind man, but we did not speak much, which suited me fine. I could see the same deep sorrow hanging over him that I myself have felt so often in recent years. The German countryside is less damaged than the cities, but even in the undisturbed fields, you can feel the difference. The vibrancy of Germany has gone out, like looking at a colored postcard of the country, rather than the country itself. It didn’t help that we were forced to stop in Paderborn for more kerosene, and so found ourselves in the shadow of Wewelsburg. I’ve gotten very good at masking my feelings about the _Reichsregierung_ , but my driver must have sensed my anger, for he gave me a small, sad smile as we drove by. Even a smile can hide a code, in these times. 

And so, here I am, back in Berlin, surrounded by the dead and dying and desperate every day, working for a real lech of a new boss, and wishing and wishing that the war would end. I wonder every day how many silent others there are out there, who love their country but hate their government, who want to win the war but don’t want to do the dirty work that winning takes. Look at me, spewing treason here on a page, the most dangerous place in the world to put anything. Clearly, I’ve reached a point where I don’t even know what I want to think about things anymore. I’m going to close this letter in the cover of one of von Linden’s horrible journals and do something with them, something to keep them safe and hidden until the war is over and I can decide for good where they should go. 

To be entirely honest, Julie, I’m tired of playing these games. I’m tired of having to live the double life of a citizen who serves her country diligently, but smiles to herself at the news of every new advance by the Allied front, however small. War is evil, in any and all cases, but the things that are happening in Hitler’s Germany are beyond the pale. It would almost be a relief to be caught out for my treachery, and sent to some prison to wait out the war, patiently and harmlessly. Would that really be too much to ask?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because there are a LOT of references to music within this first chapter, I included links to clips of the pieces in question where possible, so that those who wanted an auditory sense of Anna and Isolde's world had easily accessible points of reference. (Apologies to anyone who found said links distracting.) Also, for those not as familiar with Mozart operas, Pamina is the heroine of _Die Zauberflöte_ ( _The Magic Flute_ ) and Konstanze is the heroine of _Die Entführung aus dem Serail_ ( _The Abduction from the Seraglio_ ). Both, as Anna mentions, begin their respective operas as prisoners.
> 
> Heinrich Heine — who, incidentally, was born in Düsseldorf — is considered one of the great German Romantic poets. Sixteen of his poems were set by composer Robert Schumann in 1840 to form the popular song cycle _Dichterliebe_ ( _Poet's Love_ ). Heine's works were banned and burned by the Nazi régime because Heine had been both Jewish and politically radical. Ironically, over a century before the Third Reich rose to power, Heine had written in his 1821 play _Almansor_ , “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen," which in English means, "Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people."
> 
> Lastly, Wewelsburg is an old castle that was co-opted by the Nazis in the 1930s and intentionally turned into a cult site for their ideology. The castle now hosts a museum dedicated to remembering the site's fascist history, whose main exhibit is named "Ideology and Terror of the SS".


	2. Maddie - Scotland, December 1946

Craig Castle  
Castle Craig  
Aberdeenshire  
  
26 December 1946

Dear Miss Engel,

I apologise for intruding upon your privacy so abruptly, especially given that I don’t think it’s possible that we could have met in the past. But word of your situation has been brought to my attention, and I wanted to reach out to you myself.

My friend, Miss Rose Moyer Justice, arrived in Castle Craig two nights ago for Christmas, along with her friend, Miss Róża Czajkowska, at the invitation of myself and my husband, Jamie. Rose, as I believe you know, was an ATA pilot during the war, as was I. She brought along a draft of the article that she is writing for the _Olympia Review_ , about the ongoing Nuremberg Trials, and asked if I would read over what she had written so far. I hope that you will not be alarmed to hear that she has included an account of your conversation in the washroom, in which she speaks quite fondly of you, based on the kindness that you showed her throughout her imprisonment during the war. In the same account, she also reveals that you are to be handed over to the British authorities after giving testimony in Nuremberg, and could face imprisonment as a result of your employment at Ravensbrück.

I am not a judge in the legal sense, but based on Rose’s praise of your character, Miss Engel, I want to help you in any way that I can. Bloody and Machiavellian though the English may all appear to be to someone who fought on the other side of the war, I reported every single action I made during my service to some very Intelligent Officers. And I will do what I can to see if one of them can’t peer through his spectacles and scratch your name off any list of accused, on account of your extremely humane treatment of your team at Ravensbrück, and any other less-public acts that you may have done in rebellion against the Reich. Whatever wrongs you may have committed during the war, I’m sure you have acquitted yourself through a thousand small and unknown acts of virtue and honesty, and I trust that my government will find that to be the veritable truth, as well.

Rose also reported that she had promised you a proper flight, once the trial is over. As her family’s planes in Pennsylvania are considerably farther away than ours here in Scotland, I must insist that you come visit us here and make use of our languishing aircraft, since such a prescription would undoubtedly cheer everyone greatly. I do hope that you will say yes. As a dear friend of mine would once have argued, even an angel sometimes needs to borrow the wings of a hawk to fly free.

Yours sincerely,

The Honourable Margaret Brodatt Beaufort-Stuart


	3. Rosie - Hamburg, January 1947

Hotel am Dammtor  
Schlüterstraße 2  
Hamburg

January 4, 1947

Dear Maddie,

Greetings from your favorite legal reporter and medical student, just arrived here in Hamburg! The city is still more depressing than I’d hoped it would be — recovering, but I guess the RAF bombing raids led to a firestorm that burned out more than half the city. Like Nuremberg, there are still blocks of roofless, floorless shells of buildings that have been completely gutted, windows looking in on empty space where rooms and furniture should have been. It’s utterly chilling, and I feel somewhat sick even just thinking about it. I’ll probably jot down a poem about it later tonight, just to process my feelings.

But, more to the point, our arrival in the city has coincided with some very good news, and some very happy reunions, and otherwise a lot of uncertainty. I’ll start with the happier bits.

First of all, by reliable account, my friend Anna’s testimony in Nuremberg was phenomenal. I don’t know how she was able to handle it. Dr. Alexander said she just stood at the podium, composed and confident and looking for all the world like she was running for the President of the United States, rather than testifying at a trial about the horrific things she’d seen at Ravensbrück. It sounds like it certainly packed a punch, in just the way everyone hoped it would... well, in just the way everyone except the defendants hoped it would, at least.

The stranger but even better news is what followed.

As you read in my report, Anna was accused of “crimes against humanity” for administering anesthesia to the Rabbits prior to their terrible operations at Ravensbrück. She left Nuremberg victorious, but nonetheless under the watch of armed American guards, all of whom reportedly pressed boxes of cigarettes into her hands the instant she sat down in the car that would take her to Hamburg, or at least to the edge of the British occupation zone, where she would be handed over to her guards’ British counterparts. 

Here’s the kicker, though: The car didn’t take her to Hamburg. Or at least not directly. Anna wouldn’t tell me exactly what happened — I’m not sure if she was allowed to — but Dr. Alexander said that she was escorted directly from her testimony (on the afternoon of January 2) to the car that was supposed to take her to the Ravensbrück trial, and even though it’s only six or seven hours’ drive, she only got to Hamburg today (on the morning of January 4).

I know, because I had only arrived the night before and was poring over a map of the city in the lobby with Róża, when in came Anna, unaccompanied and looking as disoriented as though she had just landed on the moon.

“Anna!” I exclaimed, dropping my end of the map and rushing forward to greet her. 

“Rosie! For Pete’s sake, I should have guessed I’d run into you within an hour of getting into town!” she said, dropping the small bag she had with her and hugging me properly this time. “Here for the trial?” 

“Me and Róża,” I said, gesturing behind me. 

And this, of course, was extremely awkward, Maddie, as I should have known it was going to be. Róża _hates_ Anna, with good reason and more deeply than I can even try to convey, and I think it really hurt her to see a member of the only family she has (me) greeting the Angel of Sleep that she had loathed for so long.

Anna, to her credit, realized this, and quickly let go of me. She approached Róża cautiously, as though Róża actually were a quivering little rabbit with sharp teeth, and held out a hand to her.

“Good to see you, Róża,” she said levelly.

If Różyczka were a superhero with laser vision, she would have incinerated Anna right then and there with the scornful look she gave her. As it was, rather than take Anna’s hand, she spit in her face, then turned on her heel and stormed away, slamming her cane onto the marble floor of the hotel lobby with more force than was really necessary.

Anna watched her for a few seconds, then looked down at her feet and sighed, wiping the spittle off her cheek with the back of one hand. 

“I deserve it,” she muttered, in a tone that implied that she was not asking me to contradict her. So, instead of contradicting her, I picked up her bag and asked if she’d have coffee with me.

We didn’t say much as the waiter seated us in the breakfast room and took our orders, and even afterwards, we sat in silence for a bit, while Anna pulled off her gloves and unwound her scarf and tugged her arms from the sleeves of her flimsy raincoat, like a dazed butterfly emerging from a cocoon, still damp and unaccustomed to the brilliance of the world. Underneath, she wore a thin cardigan that seemed like it would be little use against the biting cold outside. I suddenly thought about the persistent, unending cold that characterized our lives at Ravensbrück, and wondered if Anna had ever completely left that world. I also wondered if her face had always been as angular as I had known it to be at Ravensbrück, or if times were still hard enough in Germany that she was still getting too little too eat, as well. 

“I hear you were quite a success in Nuremberg,” I said finally. 

“That’s kind of you to say,” she replied. “Just did what had to be done, that’s all. How have things been here?”

“I only just arrived yesterday,” I told her. “I’m getting a little nervous, truth be told.”

She looked at me coolly, with her Coke bottle eyes.

“You’re a witness?" 

“Yes,” I said, “and I’ll count myself a good one if I can stand up there without breaking down in tears from the first question!”

“You’ll be fine,” she said, more matter-of-fact than placating.

I had my doubts. 

“Yes, but Anna, what if I say something wrong? What if I forget something important, something that could exonerate you?”

The waiter chose that exact moment to appear with our coffees, and I took advantage of his appearance to order jelly doughnuts for both of us. The coffee, to my relief, was the real deal, imported from America for the influx of spoiled reporters in Hamburg and served with thick cream from the nearby countryside. Anna took her time stirring hers, and then glanced up at me.

“I’m not one of the accused.”

I blinked at her.

“What? But— but, the guards in Nuremberg...”

“Circumstances change,” she shrugged, taking a sip of coffee and setting her cup down. “I’m not one of the accused.”

It was the way she said it, so calmly and rationally. Almost as if she had been expecting it from the start, although it’s always been difficult to read Anna, so maybe she was just hiding her shock very, very well. For a crazy moment, I wanted to ask her if she had bribed the judges somehow, but of course I didn’t, because that was an impossible scenario. The waiter delivered our doughnuts in the meantime, and Anna quickly and quietly savored every bite of hers while waiting for me to respond.

“Well, blast it all, because I only agreed to be a witness to defend _you_ , and now I’m going to have to go through a whole round of interrogation for nothing,” I finally grumbled, when I’d stopped gaping at her long enough to say something.

Anna was silent for a long moment, and then, just when she appeared to be on the verge of speech or perhaps tears, she instead seized her coffee so suddenly that it sloshed over the rim of her cup and dripped onto the napkin that she’d spread over her lap, en route from the table to her lips. She then took her time dabbing the spilled coffee off of her hand, swearing almost cheerfully in German under her breath as she did so. 

“Thank you,” she said finally. “ _Gott im Himmel_ , I don’t know if there’s any way for me to thank you enough for that.” She quirked a smile at me. “You’re not going to revoke your offer to take me flying, now, are you?” 

“I guess I can’t,” I sighed in mock defeat. “Scout’s honor, remember?”

She laughed, and it was so _joyous_ compared to the laughter that I remembered — not harsh and cynical at all. 

“You _could_ always pull your name from the list of witnesses,” she reminded me, but then she leaned forward slightly and looked at me seriously. “But I don’t think you should, Rosie, I really don’t.”

“Why?” I asked, scowling. “What can I say that will be any different from what everyone else will say?”

Anna shrugged.

“For one thing, you’re an American, which probably carries a different weight in front of a panel of British judges than most other nationalities do. For another, you were unusually close to a number of the Rabbits, some of whom are no longer able to testify for themselves.” 

She paused to take another sip of coffee.

“And, most importantly, I think you’ve got to do it for yourself,” she finished. “You don’t strike me as the type of person who can easily stand by when given the opportunity to do the right thing. Are you sure you won’t regret it, if you don’t tell the world what you know?" 

She had unwittingly (or maybe deliberately) repeated what Elodie and Karolina had been shouting as they were driven off. _Tell the world_.

“Listen, we’ve all got ghosts,” Anna continued. “Everyone who’s lived through this war does. And some of them are easier to live with than others, of course. But maybe you can put these ones to rest for good.”

“But I’m not brave, like you are,” I burst out. “I can’t go stand up there in front of all of those people, cool as you please. I’ve been through hell and back, and somehow survived, but believe me, Anna, I am a _coward_.”

Anna frowned into her coffee for a long moment, then put it down and pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. After I’d refused one with a shake of my head, she pulled out a lighter, lit up, and took a long, steadying drag, still not looking at me.

“Nah, you’re not a coward, kid,” she sighed in a billow of smoke. “Anything but. Rumor has it you flew a stolen Storch out of a guarded Luftwaffe airbase into Belgium. That takes nerves of steel, if anything.”

“That’s different,” I maintained. “I was just doing what I had to do.”

“Well,” said Anna, and gestured broadly at me with her cigarette, “there you go.”

She stuck the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and considered me for a moment, then withdrew it and tapped it sharply against the edge of the ashtray on the table between us.

“ _Ach_ , well, who I am to lecture you about bravery,” she sighed. “If I had more of it myself, I’d be willing to take responsibility for what I’ve done. Serve my time. Clear my conscience. God knows it wouldn’t have been fun, but at least it would have felt right.”

“You wouldn’t have deserved it,” I told her fiercely.

“Wouldn’t I, though?” Anna smiled sadly at me and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “I’ve kept you long enough, in any case. You should go find your friend. I’m sorry that I upset her so much earlier.”

“That’s just Róża being Róża,” I told Anna, which we both knew was only partially true. “But I’ll catch up with you later on, after you’ve checked in?”

Anna let out a little bark of a laugh.

“At a fancy get-up like this?” she said. “My ride into town is staying here; I just got unloaded with the baggage. Asked to come to Hamburg because I thought I would want to stay and see how the trial was going, but the more I think about it, the worse the idea sounds. It probably would be easiest if I hopped straight onto a train out of here.” 

For a wild moment, I thought about offering to let her stay on one of the sofas in our suite, but then realized that Róża might actually inflict bodily harm on someone, if I did. 

“Are you going back to Berlin, then?” I asked as she began layering her inadequate outer garments back on.

She shrugged again, although whether this was in response to my question or to get her raincoat onto her shoulders was unclear.

“It’s where my family is. And I can probably find some work as a translator in one of the Western occupation zones or another, you know?” 

“Well.” I frowned as she finished winding her scarf around her neck and pulling on her gloves. “Look, once you’re settled, let me know, alright? And let me know before then if there’s anything that I can do for you.”

“Deal,” she said, and offered me her hand.

I took it, and then I blurted out, “And you should come to Scotland, when you can, and I’ll take you flying. My friend Maddie has a plane, and a castle, and I’m sure she’d let you come stay, if I asked her.”

I am _such_ a numbskull sometimes, Maddie. I can’t believe I invited Anna to your home without asking you first! I feel like such an idiot for having said that, but the damage is done now, and we can work out how best to rescind my offer in the near future, if you object.

In any event, Anna smiled a smile that almost seemed to contain a bottled-up laugh, and said, “That would be wonderful. Yes, I’d love to. I’ll certainly be in touch.”

So I wrote my address out on a sheet of notebook paper for her, and refused to let her pay for her breakfast, and insisted that she take my uneaten jelly doughnut with her for the road, and hugged her again before she left to face the freezing cold morning once more.

When Róża finally re-emerged into the lobby, she refused to speak to me, which I suspected would be the case. I wanted _something_ to fill the time until the trial began, but I obviously wasn’t going to be distracted by conversation as long as I stayed in the hotel, so I decided to go to the courthouse early and see what was going on there. It’s really right around the corner from our hotel, which is a blessing because it means we don’t need to wander far into the hollowed-out city, and I arrived at the Curio-Haus with time to spare, the uncharacteristically silent Róża trailing stormily behind me, for lack of anything better to do. The reporters were already arriving and congregating in the courtyard of the building, but our attention was instead caught by an elegant woman passing by us on the sidewalk, who was oddly familiar and yet completely unlike anyone I’d ever met.

“Lisette?”

Róża had already seen her in Sweden, but I admit, I was shocked when she turned to face us. I always knew that Lisette in the real world — clean and adequately fed and properly attired— would be beautiful and sophisticated, but it just about knocked me over to meet that version of her in the flesh. In her incarnation as the former detective novelist and orchestral musician, she was like some wealthy intellectual from New York City who gets written up in the papers for hosting classy soirées, the sort of person I probably never would have had the nerve or inclination to approach. It’s somewhat incredible to me that she was the closest thing I had to a parent during the most intense months of my entire life.

But when her face broke into a smile at the sight of us, all I could remember were her graces in Polish over our meager dinners, the little Christmas presents we gave her, the way she would hum whatever pieces of music Karolina requested at night when we were in our bunk. And suddenly we were hugging each other and laughing and crying all at once, and Lisette kept repeating “Oh, my darlings!” over and over.

“So you made it from Scotland?” she asked finally, stepping back and looking us over with evident pride. “Rosie, I can’t say how glad it makes me to see you doing so well with my own eyes, as if your letters and your published poems weren’t already evidence enough!”

“And likewise!” I replied with a stupidly happy grin, and then I faltered a bit. “Lisette, what are _you_ doing right now?”

Lisette, it seems, is doing as well as one can under the circumstances. She couldn’t bear to return to Lublin after the war — she had nothing left to return to, after all — so she went back to Paris, where all of her friends who had remained resentful but quiet throughout the Vichy occupation welcomed her back with surprised relief. With their help, she secured a job as a librarian in a small private library... and enough money to purchase a new bass violin. In the hours after her workday ends, she has since been picking up gigs where she can get them, mostly in jazz clubs filled with Americans visiting Paris with an eye to invest in liberated France. It keeps her busy, she says. Plus, she is beginning to work on a new book. When I asked if it was one of the detective novels that made her famous when she was young, she shook her head. 

“My detective could only have existed before the war,” she explained sadly. “She was a good character, but there was very little about my books that was serious. Now, when so much has happened, it’s impossible to imagine writing about something so frivolous. It’s much harder to write murder mysteries in the same lighthearted manner when so many people you love have been murdered.”

We all fell silent at that moment. Lisette, I know, was thinking about her husband and sons, and Róża about her mother. I thought about Elodie and Micheline, and Karolina and so many others who had been so much braver or so much less fortunate than I. And, not for the first time, I was so incredibly grateful that my family had been safe in the States and in England for the entire war.

“But I’m so glad that you’re both here,” said Lisette finally, smiling warmly at us, her adopted daughters. “That gives me more comfort than you can possibly imagine.”

She wrapped a protective arm around each of us.

“Come,” she said simply, and led us through the doors into the building.

I have to write about the trial for my article eventually, Maddie, and I’ll let you read that when I’ve written it all up, which I feel I can’t do today. I think it will take the length of the proceedings for me to sort it all out in my head, to back up from events enough that I can order things into rational, meaningful sequences, rather than the abstract, impressionistic blurs that they are right now. If seeing Anna in Nuremberg last month was like seeing a ghost, today was like some sort of disorienting nightmare, the sort in which things are uncanny because they are in the wrong place from where they should be. Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the paneled “courtroom,” which was really more like a church with its balconies and its pipe organ, I saw the faces of people who had terrified me when I was at Ravensbrück, and I felt almost sick with dread because of their presence; but at the same time I was almost more bewildered by how _small_ they all looked at a distance, surrounded by guards who stood around the defendants’ dock.

I guess what scared me about the whole situation was that today they all looked so vulnerable and _human_. It was easier to think of them all as monsters of some sort, but I think it’s even more terrifying to acknowledge how normal they look, given the monstrous things they’ve done. 

In any case, I think I understand a little bit better how Róża felt throughout the trial last month. And why she hates Anna so much. Lisette invited us to dinner afterwards, and, while Róża was in the bathroom, she asked me why Róża hadn’t been speaking to me all day. I explained about seeing Anna at the hotel, and why Róża held a grudge against her, and when Lisette looked aghast about the whole situation, I also clarified that Anna was also the _Kolonka_ who had given me the calcium shots for Różyczka and warned us all about the liquidation of the Rabbits in advance.

“I see,” said Lisette, who seemed to have placed Anna tentatively back within the realms of acceptability with this new information. “Was she one of the defendants today?”

“She was supposed to be there,” I explained, “but she told me this morning that she’d been taken off the list of the accused. She didn’t say why, but I believe her. There weren’t any guards with her when I saw her this morning, even though she left Nuremberg in military custody.”

“Taken off the list of he accused?” Lisette frowned and drummed a finger pensively against the edge of her water glass. “Well, assuming that the British government isn’t falling for bribes, the only explanation is that their military knows something about her that we don’t, something that’s big enough to exonerate her for what she did to Różyczka and the other Rabbits. She was in Ravensbrück for political insubordination, wasn’t she?”

“She was working for a military commander,” I told Lisette. “He charged her with assault for trying to fight him off when he raped her." 

Lisette’s brow was still furrowed in puzzled suspicion, but it softened slightly with sympathy.

“She’s not a bad person, Lisette,” I insisted. “She’s not at all proud of what she did to the Rabbits, and she’s been trying to atone for it ever since. Even though Różyczka wants to see her locked up, I think the guilt that Anna feels on a daily basis is far worse than prison would have been.”

“Well, I trust that that may be the case, but I still think it’s best to let Róża process this the way she needs to, without trying to convince her of anything that she may not want to hear just yet,” Lisette said, and I knew what she meant.

At that moment, Róża returned, and we had to stop speculating over what Anna Engel could have possibly done to get out of jail free. But I’ve been wondering about it all evening, Maddie. I doubt she’ll ever tell me, but it’s fun to make up stories in pure speculation: Anna Engel, blackmailing Churchill with scandalous love letters that have fallen into her possession; Anna Engel, selling military secrets about tactical weapons and troop deployment to the Americans; Anna Engel, cigarette-smoking undercover spy for the French Résistance. (I should warn you that I’m making her out to be far more intriguing than she really is, just so you’re not disappointed if and when you meet her.)

Róża has fallen asleep by now, still without saying a word to me since this morning, so I’m going to do the same and hope that she’s less furious with me by tomorrow. I suspect that the stress of reliving so many unpleasant memories today has been as trying on her nerves as it has been on mine. I hope that all is well at Castle Craig — my best to Jamie and Esmé and the bairns, and apologies again for inviting Anna to Scotland without your permission.

Your friend,  
Rosie

 

P.S. Oh, and here’s a rough draft of the poem I’ve been writing all day. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but it’s a start, and I think it will come unraveled as I tease these trials out into some form that I can understand, as well.

 

 _EUROPE, 1947_ (by Rose Justice)

Across this bleak and barren blighted land,  
Beneath a clear and cold uncaring sky,  
Row after row of hollow buildings stand  
Where rubble heaps like funeral mounds still lie.

I, too, have seen the heavens blank and vast  
And wept for lack of wings. But now I cry  
For those who weathered all the tempests past  
And now have wings, but yet nowhere to fly.

We seek revenge in justice, but in vain:  
No verdict can revive all those we lost.  
Is victory a shell that echoes pain?  
What justice compensates the human cost?

And yet on truth and hope and grace we build,  
With faith the empty spaces can be filled.


	4. Maddie - Scotland, May 1947

Craig Castle  
Castle Craig  
Aberdeenshire

8 May 1947

My dearest Jamie,

I SO wish you didn’t have to be in London this week, of all weeks! I’ve already made Anna promise that she’ll come back and visit again, when you’re at Castle Craig and can meet her yourself. She told me that she still thinks of you as ‘The Pobble with No Toes,’ and it would be helpful for her to get a sense of what you’re like beyond the nickname. Unless that’s how you want to be remembered, but I doubt it.

Rosie is scheduled to arrive early tomorrow morning, and it’s actually been something of a relief to have had a chance to talk to Anna without needing to pretend like we’ve never met. Anna arrived in the mid-afternoon, and at the gate she encountered one of the boys, who brought her around to the kitchen, just like they did for me all those years ago. (We’ve told Jock and Ross that she’s an American, by the way, just so they don’t panic about having a German guest staying with us. The poor lads, I think it will be a while yet before they stop thinking of the Jerries universally as being bogeymen with bombs powerful enough to destroy Glasgow. Thankfully, Anna’s English is spectacularly good, and as the boys have never met an American from Chicago before, they assume that that’s why her accent sounds a little different from Rosie’s.)

And so there we were, Anna Engel and I, standing in our kitchen, staring at each other. She looked much more gaunt than I remembered her looking in Ormaie, but at the same time much less tense. I wondered if she was similarly sizing me up to the Maddie Brodatt in her memory.

‘So, you made it,’ I said finally, venturing a smile that I’m sure was twitchier than I would have liked (don't know why I was so close to crying). ‘Second star to the right, and straight on ‘til morning.’

‘And I see Käthe Habicht made it safely back home to Alsace, as well,’ she said, smiling back at me. She set down her bag and strode over to me, holding out her hand. ‘Thank you so much for this, for everything.’

I took her hand, remembering that the last time I had done so, there had been a key in her palm and a terrifying Hauptsturmführer around the corner. It was jolly good to see her again without any threats hanging over our heads.

‘I’m just glad it all worked out,’ I said simply. ‘Here, let me show you around Neverland.’

If I’m completely honest, it’s bloody unnerving when I remember how much Anna knows about us. I was struck by that when I saw her at the café in Ormaie, although of course now Rosie’s account of Ravensbrück has balanced the scales somewhat. (I don’t think Anna knows about Rosie’s frenzy of journaling right after she returned to Paris, but I figure I won’t mention it unless Rosie does first.) In any case, it was clear that Anna had envisioned Craig Castle as best she could from all of Julie’s descriptions and was enjoying comparing her imaginings to the reality. When I showed her Julie’s room, a wistful expression fell over her face.

‘Does your mother-in-law still leave the windows open at night?’ she asked. ‘Or, with the war over, is that unnecessary?’

‘We usually keep the windows closed now, to keep out the usual cold and damp,’ I explained.

But I went to the window and unlatched it anyway. It was sunny but gusty outside, and the winds knocked the pane insistently against the wall. A bad day for flying. Yet another reason why it’s a good thing Rosie doesn’t arrive until tomorrow.

When I turned around, Anna was not looking at the window, but rather at the bookshelves. I watched her as she perused the titles of the German-language tomes that had once belonged to Julie. Brecht, Goethe, Büchner, Schiller, Hesse, Mann, Heine... names that I’ve seen so many times while sitting in Julie’s room, but never bothered to crack open. Anna’s finger trailed before the spines of the books, as though she feared to touch them.

‘If you want any of them, please feel free to take them with you,’ I told her. ‘None of us can read them, and we only keep them here because Esmé hasn’t yet had the heart to throw them out.’

Anna pulled her hand back from the books as quickly as though they’d suddenly burst into flames.

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, startled.

She shook her head.

‘It just wouldn’t feel right.’ She pressed her thin lips together. ‘Stealing from you what little you have of her.’

You know how much I still cry over Julie, Jamie, so you won’t be surprised to hear that my eyes started watering right away. But I wasn’t expecting Anna to start sniffling, as well. In all of Julie’s writings, she only mentions Anna crying once, and I have to assume it was because the RAF had bombed Berlin to smithereens the night before (which Julie couldn’t have known, if Anna hadn’t told her). And Rosie only mentions Anna getting emotional over the memory of food while starving, and over being slated for execution, both of which are dramatic enough circumstances that I can’t really blame her. Guess I’ve gotten used to imagining Anna as being as stoic as she was when I met her, but it appears her Eva Seiler-esque ‘Teutonic Mädchen’ persona is only that – a persona.

I swept the books off of Julie’s shelf and loaded them into Anna’s arms, both of us still crying.

‘She would have wanted you to have them,’ I maintained stubbornly. ‘You were her friend, too, after all.’

‘ _Ach_ , some friend!’ Anna laughed harshly, clutching the pile of books. ‘One moment sneaking her cigarettes when no one was looking, the next having to slap her into silence when that devil felt she was getting too cheeky. Do you know how close we came to having to wash her mouth out with carbolic acid? You can’t fake chemical burns; I would have actually had to do it, if it came down to it, although thank god no one really wanted it to happen. You can argue that we were allies in our own little war against the Ormaie Gestapo, but we didn’t have the chance to discuss anything _meaningful_ , not having met the way we did. How can you call that a real friendship?’

I didn’t know how to respond. I couldn’t even try to understand what Anna and Julie’s relationship had been like, not when I had had the luxury of befriending Julie on lazy bicycle rides around the countryside, through learning from her how to foxtrot, while letting her cry herself to sleep in my arms. You can’t do any of that when one of you is supposed to be abusing the other, and Gestapo guards are constantly watching.

‘You were willing to risk your life to help us accomplish her mission, a mission that she was more than willing to die for,’ I said finally. ‘If that’s not friendship, then I don’t know what is.’

Anna sniffed and looked down at the stack of books in her arms.

‘Well, thank you,’ she said, and then she looked at me. ‘May I make an odd request, or actually two?’

I shrugged.

‘Do you have a copy of _Peter Pan_?’ she asked somewhat sheepishly. ‘Just to borrow while I’m here. I’ve never read it before, and this seems like an appropriate place to read it.’

I quickly found a copy on the shelf that Julie had crammed with British children’s literature, and slid it haphazardly onto a volume of Heine that was already teetering precariously at the top of the stack of books in Anna’s arms.

‘Keep it as long as you’d like,’ I told her, since I’m fairly certain we have another copy somewhere. ‘And what was the second?’

Anna exhaled slowly.

‘This is a long shot, I know, but do you still have her testimony? I assume you had to hand it in to your superior officers, but I thought I would ask, just in case there was any way to see it again.’

I met Anna’s glass-green gaze and smiled.

‘Why don’t you put the books down on the bedspread there?’ I said. ‘You’re welcome to stay in this room as long as you’re visiting, if it won’t make you unhappy.’

Anna looked surprised, but she obligingly put the books down.

‘You still have it, then?’ she asked quietly. ‘The report? Julie’s report?’

I took her hand.

‘It’s not just Julie’s report,’ I told her. ‘It’s _your_ report, too.’

I left Anna alone at the desk in the smaller of the two libraries while she read through it all — what Julie had written, what she herself had underlined and translated in red, and also the bits that she didn’t know, the bits that I had written. When I checked on her a few hours later, she was just finishing up my narrative, and her nose was red from crying.

‘You look like you could use this,’ I said, sliding a glass of cognac across the desk to her.

She sniffed and accepted the cognac with a grateful nod and a watery smile.

‘You didn’t tell me,’ she said, taking a generous sip of cognac and staring at me intensely but without any hint of accusation.

‘I couldn’t talk about it then,’ I replied. ‘It was all too fresh.’

Anna nodded.

‘I’m so sorry, Maddie,’ she said, on the verge of breaking into tears again.

I waited while she took another gulp of cognac and regained her composure.

‘I know what you meant,’ she continued, ‘when you said that reading her words was like recapturing what she was like when she was alive. It’s extraordinary, how well she’s painted herself, cleverness and barbs and all. Or, really, how she manages to capture it all so well without telling the truth about anything.’

‘Anything?’ I asked, slightly defensively.

‘Well, switching out the names of the airbases, as you said. Not speaking nearly as directly about what happened to the French prisoners as she could have — I suppose she wanted to spare you that. Slandering me right and left, of course, the troublemaker.’

Half of Anna’s mouth twitched upwards in a smile.

‘I’d forgotten about those prescription cards, somehow. _Lieber Gott_ , she cackled like a fiend when she wrote those out. I actually did want to slap her then, for being so damn pleased with herself at my expense. And that _Romeo and Juliet_ nonsense about Thibaut and me! Bah! I left that out of my translation, of course.’

I’ve read it all so many times, as you know, that nothing in it surprises me anymore. So I couldn’t help but laugh a bit to myself as I watched Anna rediscover Julie’s nonsensical genius, her nostrils flaring slightly in indignation.

‘Did Thibaut’s sisters really refer to me as the “slave-girl,” by the way?’ she asked me, her brow furrowing anxiously.

‘Oh,’ I faltered. ‘Well, they had strange nicknames for everyone, you know.’

Anna sighed.

‘They weren’t wrong,’ she acknowledged. ‘Pity. I liked them. I guess I was just holding out hope that they didn’t think as badly of me as everyone else did. Myself included, of course.’

She took another swig of cognac.

‘I don’t blame you for thinking of me as von Linden’s slave,’ she told me. ‘Or for being so scared of me when I surprised you at the café. I don’t like remembering who I was, back then. Mind you, it’s not much better when I remember who I am now. Things are still pretty rotten, back in Germany. _Everything’s_ in the process of being rebuilt, and there’s no food to speak of — not that anyone has any money for food in the first place. Sure, I’ve got a decent job as a translator for the British army, helping the Control Commission run its “re-education” programs for the Berlin police force, but even that loses something when everyone is so demoralised, and when you don’t even trust yourself to do the right thing anymore. Unlike you, we don’t have the moral certitude of victory.’

It’s funny, but in a way, I’d almost forgotten that Anna is German. I know that sounds like just about the stupidest thing imaginable, but it’s true — I’m so used to thinking of the Germans as ‘them,’ and I now think of Anna so much as one of ‘us,’ that it takes a moment for me to remember she can be both. So it caught me off guard to hear her put herself in a different category from me.

‘Have you thought about leaving?’ I asked her.

‘All the time,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘I have this fantasy about saving enough money to get on a plane back to Chicago. Just flying off to the States, re-establishing myself there, maybe taking on a false identity, going back into research.’

She smiled grimly at her almost-empty glass of cognac.

‘Of course, it would all be completely impossible in practice, since I don’t think any self-respecting American university would want to hire some former Nazi war criminal.’

‘But Rosie’s family could probably help you...’

‘It’s all a fantasy, anyway,’ Anna repeated with an air of finality, before knocking back the rest of the cognac and setting the glass down on the table. ‘And frankly, I feel I have an obligation to stay in Germany. I helped fuck the place up in my own small way, after all, so I should stay and make it right again. Someone has to.’

Couldn’t really argue with that logic, so I just nodded.

‘Have you thought about going back ever?’ Anna asked me suddenly. ‘To Ormaie, I mean.’

‘I’m not supposed to have any reason to go to Ormaie,’ I reminded her.

‘Well, you have family there, now, don’t you?’ She gestured to the stack of papers on the desk. ‘Madame Damask.’

God, Jamie. She was right, of course, but I’m just not sure I want to meet your great-aunt formally for the first time when there’s still a good chance that I’ll burst into tears in front of her. It’s mortifying enough to think that I spent an hour bawling in the arms of some poor stranger who was nice enough to boil me a fresh egg after such a display, but it’s even more mortifying to know that I could see her again and would very likely do the _exact same thing_. Besides, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back to that area by the bridge again, for as long as I live. I shuddered without meaning to, and Anna noticed.

‘Now that I know where she’s buried, I’d like to go pay my respects,’ she explained quietly. ‘But it sounds like the graves are on private property, and I wouldn’t want to impose. I was wondering if you could do so on my behalf, but it doesn’t sound like that’s a possibility, either.’

‘You should go yourself,’ I told her, my voice catching a bit. ‘You’re right, I can’t go back there, not just yet. But Jamie’s great-aunt would let you in to pay your respects, I’m sure. You were an informant on her circuit; she’d know who you are, if you explained.’

‘An informant on a French Résistance circuit,’ Anna mused, as if she still couldn’t quite believe that that was what she had been. ‘Well, if you really think she wouldn’t mind.’

‘Just one thing,’ I added quickly. ‘If you do visit Madame Damask, she won’t know me by my real name. She only knows me as Kittyhawk.’

‘I somehow think I can remember that,’ Anna said with a smile.

As she began shuffling the pages back into a neat stack, a thoughtful frown appeared on her face.

‘Truth be told, this is only one of the amends I need to make,’ she said. ‘You remember von Linden’s daughter, Isolde?’

I nodded.

‘I went and found her, before they sent me to Ravensbrück. Meant to tell her all about her father, but I didn’t have the heart. It’s one thing to swear to yourself that you’re going to reveal the truth, the whole truth, to the one person from whom a bastard like von Linden wants to hide it, but it’s another to try to tell all that to a poor kid who’s just been orphaned and still thinks her Papa walked on water. I still don’t know if I regret what I did or not. Probably doesn’t matter.’

Anna sighed.

‘The thing is, I thought that the whole business was over and out of my hands. Everything was in such a state of chaos when I got back to Berlin after the war, and I had to focus on getting my life back in order before anything else. And then the Americans came and arrested me, and I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be in a position to deal with anything related to Ormaie for the next decade or so. But now it’s all different.’

She looked around the library, at its deep shelves and towering stacks of books and rows of drawers.

‘Your mother-in-law said that this place absorbs secrets like the damp,’ Anna said. ‘Can it absorb a few more? Things that you probably don’t want to know, but that need to be remembered.’

She has von Linden’s journals, Jamie. And she wants to leave them here.

Anna left them with her grandmother, you see. She spent a few days living at her mother’s place in Berlin while she transitioned into her new job, the one that got her thrown in Ravensbrück. When she was there, she asked her grandmother if she could leave her a bag with six slim, calfskin notebooks in it. ‘They’re nothing illegal, but I don’t want anyone to find them on me, if something happens,’ Anna told her. ‘If you can put them somewhere safe, I’ll come back for them after the war and figure out what to do with them.’ So she went off to her new job, and her grandmother kept the bag, and when Anna disappeared, she quietly had it locked in a small bank vault on the edge of the city, where it somehow survived the war, in spite of all of the bombing.

‘Of course, my grandmother was so shocked when I came home after the war that she forgot to tell me what had happened to the journals,’ Anna told me over more cognac, back in the kitchen. ‘I was in shock, too, to be fair. For one thing, I still looked like a prisoner when I got home. It was hard, making my way back to Berlin, with my hair still growing back and nothing to wear but that awful striped uniform — everyone knew where I’d come from, and nobody wanted to help me. And then to come back to the city, and to find it so completely and utterly destroyed...’

She shuddered.

‘Well, let’s just say it was a lot to take in. And Rosie’s already told you about what happened to my family when the Soviets reached Berlin. Add to that the fact that my Oma burst into tears every time she saw me for the first few days after I reached home that it took a couple of weeks for her to remember that the journals hadn’t been destroyed in some bombing raid or another. But I have them now.’

‘Here?’ I asked her, gobsmacked.

Anna nodded.

‘I’m still not sure why I brought them. Like I said, you probably wouldn’t want to read them, even if you could. But they’re probably no use to the authorities, since von Linden is dead, except to get people like Thibaut hung. And unless I muster the courage to send them to Isolde, they’re no use to me.’

She looked torn about it all. I thought about Jacques and Marie, about the guards who wordlessly carried out the dismantling of the human wireless sets while von Linden gave instructions and averted his eyes, about the guillotine execution that had made La Cadette cry for hours afterwards. And I thought about the guards accompanying the transport that we ambushed, and how much I still want EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM to die for what they did to their prisoners, and for what they made me do to Julie.

There, and even just writing it here, I’ve had to put the pen down and have myself a good cry. Stupid Nazi bastards.

So for a ghastly moment, I really did want to tell Anna to bugger it all and send the journals over to whatever courts are trying the heartless people who aided and abetted what went on in Ormaie. But then I thought about Etienne Thibaut, erstwhile bird-watcher, and how his parents and Mitraillette and La Cadette had loved him in spite of his unforgivable behaviour, and how devastated they’d be if he were hung after they’d spent the _whole war_ protecting him from everyone in the area who hated him (and I mean HATED him) for collaborating with the Jerries.

‘Leave them here,’ I said instead. ‘I don’t want to read them, and I don’t think that Jamie or Esmé will want to, either. But maybe someone will, someday. Maybe Isolde will want to know the whole truth and come looking for them here.’

And yes, I’ve spent the last few hours hoping and hoping that your mother won’t mind that I all but invited the horrible v.L.’s daughter to come dig through our library. Anna swears that Isolde’s a very nice girl, but I’m still terrified that your mum is never again going to leave me alone to run the house while she goes to Edinburgh.

In any event, around this time the boys decided that they were famished and started kicking up a fuss, so I poured Anna the rest of the cognac and told the lads that they could come into the kitchen. At some point, I told them that the pork in the icebox was for the next day, because Rosie wanted to make proper American pork barbecue for dinner when she arrived, with Boston cream pie for dessert, and the mention of this made Anna once more burst into tears quite unexpectedly, startling me quite a bit, although not nearly as much as the lads.

‘Sorry,’ she cried, sitting down on a bench as the boys edged closer to her in concern. ‘They’re just dishes that I’ve missed. Haven’t had them since I was back in Chicago. Very sweet of Rosie to think to make them for me here.’

This explanation for Anna’s outburst was enough for the boys, who nodded solemnly. Ross informed Anna that he used to cry when he thought about the raisin scones at the bakery across from his Mum and Dad’s in Glasgow, which is gone because the wicked Jerries blew it up with bombs, and then he launched into a long tirade against the Germans that had far less to do with actual facts than with the angry emotions of a wee war orphan. Anna swallowed her tears and took Ross’s little hands when he started to cry, and told him that she was very, very sorry to hear about the bakery and the scones, very sorry to hear about everything.

Amazingly, given the potential for everything to go so completely wrong, the lads really warmed to Anna over supper. Like Julie, she seems to have mastered the art of telling half-truths that sound perfectly credible. They wanted to know where she was from; she told them that she used to live in Chicago. They wanted to know why she was visiting; she told them that Miss Rosie had promised to take her flying. And then they wanted to know where she had met Miss Rosie, and she said during the war, and then they started to ask how and what Anna had been doing during the war, and whether she was also a pilot, and did Anna also know Miss Róża who came to visit with Miss Rosie at Christmas? Anna glanced at me and read from a slight shake of my head that the boys knew nothing about Ravensbrück.

‘Rosie and I became friends during the war because we were both a long way from home and wished we could go back and see our families and friends,’ she explained vaguely. ‘I didn’t really meet Róża until after the war, and I still don’t know her that well, but I hope that we have the chance to become better friends one day. And if I were a pilot, Mister Jock, do you really think I’d have to ask Rosie to take me flying in one of your planes?’

‘But if you weren’t a pilot, then what were you?’ Jock asked stubbornly.

‘Guess,’ said Anna, who knew that the words ‘pharmacist’ and ‘ _Kolonka_ ’ were almost certainly not in her interrogator’s vocabulary.

Jock screwed up his face in concentration.

‘Nurse.’

‘Nope.’

‘Spy,’ interrupted Ross, licking jelly from his palm.

‘Do I look like a spy to you?’ Anna asked him coolly.

Ross wrinkled his nose at her in concentration as she stared him down. Finally, he shook his head.

‘You look too dull,’ he said decisively. ‘Spies have funny moustaches, or hats, or fancy clothes, and you don’t.’

‘So if I put on, say, a red Chanel cocktail dress, and sat at a table at the Ritz with a cigarette in a fancy holder, then I’d look like a spy?’ Anna challenged him.

Ross nodded solemnly, and Anna laughed.

‘I was a secretary,’ she said. ‘And a driver. So, in some sense, I was a lot like Rosie, and like Maddie and Jamie, in that I transported things and people around during the war.’ She looked over Ross’s head at me. ‘Just without nearly as much freedom.’

Anna was pretty exhausted by the time supper was over, so I told the lads to leave her alone, and she retreated off to Julie’s bedroom, where I suspect she’s been reading _Peter Pan_ ever since. And that just about brings me to the present, which is to say that I decided to write to you because otherwise I _knew_ I would spend the entire evening crying over how much I wish Julie were here — which I have been doing anyway, of course, but thanks to the eternally useful Eterpen, hopefully it hasn’t smudged all of this up too badly. All of which is to say that I miss you terribly, and I wish that you were here, too; but, since you aren’t, I hope that all is well in London, and that you fly back to us very soon. I’ll be keeping our bedroom window open, until you do.

Much love,  
Maddie


	5. Anna - Ormaie, May 1947

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick linguistic disclaimer: While my French and German are both solid enough that I can muddle my way through Paris or Berlin without too much trouble, I am extremely far from fluent and therefore apologize for what I'm sure is sometimes cringeworthy grammar below. (Any native or fluent speakers should feel more than welcome to correct my errors!)

Tours  
France  
  
13\. Mai 1947

Dear Maddie, 

I’ll try to keep this brief, since I need to catch a bus to Paris shortly, and since I owe you a much longer thank you letter, once I’m back in Berlin. I can’t say how much I enjoyed staying at Craig Castle for the few days that I spent there, getting to see you and Rosie and meeting the boys, and of course flying. If you were serious about my coming back to visit sometime when Jamie is home, I would be delighted to accept the invitation. (I need to return your copy of _Peter Pan_ someday, in any case — thank you for letting me carry it off.)

In case you’re wondering about the initials embossed at the top of this page, I’m writing you on stationery taken from the desk in the childhood bedroom of Étienne Thibaut. He himself lived there quietly for a few weeks after the Vichy government fell, but then the rest of the neighborhood ratted him out to the French authorities, and they arrested him and put him on trial for treason against his fellow _citoyens_. He’s now serving out a prison sentence in Rouen, which will last another few years. Strange as it feels to write it, I hope he’s okay.

But I’m leaping ahead of myself. The trip from London to Dover was uneventful, and the seas were remarkably calm across the Channel, although since the train tracks across France are still badly damaged, it was buses from Calais onwards. I was able to find a car and a map easily enough when I reached Tours via Paris, and I only got turned around once before the countryside finally began to look familiar. Even when the car — a Citroën Rosalie, like your favorite vehicle — sputtered and died in the middle of a country lane, it happened only about two miles from the Thibauts’ farm, so I could go the rest of the way by foot. So I was certain that something was going to have to go wrong when I finally arrived _chez_ Thibaut, because it seemed impossible for everything to have worked out so seamlessly. It made me sick with worry that I’d reach the farm and the family would no longer be there, which would mean I’d have to ask someone else where they were (or, worse, if they were still alive). And, on a selfish level, I sincerely hoped that, if my extraordinary good luck had to run out, it wouldn’t result in me being thrown in some prison because someone in Ormaie recognized that I’d worked for the Gestapo, once upon a time.

But the first thing I saw when I approached the farm was Amélie (La Cadette, I should say) perched on the steps of the house, carving something out of a piece of wood and whistling a tune with piercing accuracy. I actually didn’t recognize her, at first — she’s grown from an angel-faced little girl into a pretty but gangly teenager, all arms and legs. I think she recognized me immediately, though, because the minute she noticed me walking up the drive, her jaw dropped, and I honestly was afraid that she was going to drop her knife right onto her bare foot, too. The next moment, she was scrambling up the stairs of the house, shouting in a distracted patois of French and German, “ _Maman! Maman! Viens, viens vite! Fräulein Engel ist wiedergekommen!_ ” 

When Maman Thibaut appeared at the door of the house and stared down at me, her expression unreadable, I was almost certain that my luck had run out. Yes, I knew that her family had recruited me as an informant, but was that enough to exonerate me for several months of catering to the every whim of a man who had tortured and killed so many of her friends and neighbors? 

“ _Fräulein Engel_ ,” said Maman Thibaut. “ _Mein Gott. Das ist wirklich unerwartet._ ”

You wouldn’t have thought that my reappearance was so unexpected, from the measured voice in which she said it. I still couldn’t tell if she found the surprise pleasant or not.

“ _Sans doute_ ,” I replied, “ _mais je voulais savoir, si votre famille et vous, vous aviez survécu la guerre. Ça va bien?_ ”

Maman Thibaut’s eyes filled with tears.

“ _Oui_ ,” she replied quietly, “ _sauf Étienne, chez nous, on a survécu_ _la guerre – grâce à Dieu, et grâce à toi, aussi_.” 

And then she surprised me by descending the steps far more quickly than I could have imagined and grabbing me in a fierce hug. 

“ _Es freut mir sehr, dich wiederzusehen_ ,” she told me, and I was about to reply that I was glad to see her again, too, but first I wanted to make something very clear.

“ _S’il vous plaît_ ,” I said, “ _je serais plus confortable, si on parlerait en français. Même si je suis allemande, la France est encore à vous maintenant, alors il faut utiliser votre propre langue._ ”

Maman Thibaut beamed at me approvingly and planted a flurry of _bises_ on my cheeks, and with an “ _Alors, allons-y!_ ” that was just short of a battle cry, she marched me up the stairs and into the house, from which Amélie had been watching the spectacle with bemusement.

Gabrielle-Thérèse — whom I think I will have to start calling Mitraillette, because it suits her so well — was in the kitchen plucking a dead chicken. She gasped when she saw me and careened around the table, bumping it with her hip so that the knives clattered against the wooden cutting boards.

“ _Mon Dieu, Anna!_ ” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around me as best she could without getting chicken blood and feathers all over me. “ _Warum bist du hier?_ ”

“ _En français!_ ” barked Maman Thibaut, cuffing Mitraillette gently on the ear. “ _Ce capitaine maudit ne peut pas nous entendre maintenant, n’est-ce pas?_ ”

“ _Alors?_ ” Mitraillette challenged me, without bothering to ask again why I was here.

I put my bag down on the table (the side free of chicken carcasses) and looked at both of them, and at Amélie, who was lingering in the kitchen doorframe.

“ _Je cherche la vérité_ ,” I said softly.

Maman Thibaut and Mitraillette looked at each other in confusion until Amélie clucked her tongue impatiently.

“ _La Vérité, Maman_ ,” she repeated. “ _La meilleure amie de Kittyhawk_.” 

A hush fell across the room, and Maman Thibaut bowed her head.

“Brave Verity,” she said (in French, of course). “I shouldn’t be surprised, seeing as you risked your career to save her.”

“Tried to save her,” I said bitterly, but Mitraillette cut me off. 

“Don’t be absurd, Anna,” she snapped. “What more could you have done? What more could any of us have done?”

There was another moment of silence, and then Amélie sighed.

“Well, Kittyhawk got out okay, at least,” she told me. “Back to Britain, I mean.”

I smiled at her. 

“I did know,” I told her. “I’ve seen her, actually.”

All three gave a collective gasp of excitement and burst into a flurry of questions.

“You _saw_ her?! How, and when...?”

“Did she look well? Had she survived the war in one piece?” 

“Yes,” I said, “yes, she’s doing fine, I saw her a few days ago at her home in Scotland...”

“How did you know how to look her up?” Amélie asked loudly, above the clamor. “Do you know her real name?”

Maman Thibaut and Mitraillette immediately quit their questioning and stared at me with baited breath.

“Yes,” I admitted, “but I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you.”

Mitraillette groaned in exasperation and threw a chicken blood-spattered dish rag half-heartedly in my direction.

“Only because I think she’d like to come say thank you for your hospitality herself, sometime,” I explained as I easily side-stepped Mitraillette’s missile.  “And I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

“You could be making up everything you’ve just said about having seen her, then,” scoffed Amélie.

“Except that she sent presents for all of you,” I retorted, and pulled out all of the gifts that you sent.

I have to say, it was quite something trying to explain the concept of a tartan to Amélie, especially when the first thing she did when she unwrapped the hat you’d sent her was to steal the matching scarf you’d sent her mother, ignore everything I had to say, and break into her own impromptu version of a Scottish dance, feet kicking and hands in the air. By the time Maman Thibaut had scolded her back into stillness, I’d finished explaining to Mitraillette that her new skirt was made of your family’s tartan, and how it now meant that she had a gift that linked her to William Wallace (thank you for explaining to me who he was, before I left). Predictably, the ever-revolutionary Mitraillette quite liked the idea of William Wallace when I explained him to her.

“I’ll wear the _tartan_ with pride,” she said solemnly, charmingly pronouncing the word as if it were French, and she told me to send you her thanks.

Papa Thibaut arrived back at the farm somewhere in the midst of all of this, and was just as surprised to see me as the rest, but he appreciated the scotch you sent along for him, and welcomed me in with good grace.

“And you’re staying the night, aren’t you?” he asked me, and when I told him that I had been planning to go back to Tours and find a hotel (if I could get the Rosalie working again before dark), he threw up his hands in dismay. 

“ _Mais non!_ If you are already here, then you will stay with us tonight, as our guest.”

“But if anyone from the town recognizes me,” I began to say, but Papa Thibaut waved his hand at me.

“Then Gabrielle-Thérèse will shout at them until they go away. Really, it’s no trouble at all. We’re in the middle of preparing enough dinner to feed five, anyway, and you can always stay in Étienne’s room...”

The weight of what he had just said seemed to hit him a moment after the words had left his mouth, and he fell silent immediately. Maman Thibaut let out a sob, and Mitraillette hacked a slice of baguette off the loaf so aggressively that it flew off the cutting board and onto the floor.

I changed the subject as quickly as I could, and asked if there was anything that I could do to help with dinner.

After dinner, Papa Thibaut went to fetch the stranded car from where I’d left it on the road, and I asked Mitraillette to show me the loft where you’d spent so many days hiding out from von Linden & Co. (and yes, I’m including myself in that Co.). She seemed surprised that I already knew where you had hidden out, and I’m not sure she would have shown me otherwise, but since I was the one who brought it up, she didn’t see any point in hiding it. I must say, Maddie, I don’t know how you maintained your sanity all alone in that cramped little space, knowing that there was absolutely no chance to escape if you were caught, or if the explosives below caught fire. Even in Ravensbrück, horrible as that was, there were other people around to share my anxieties, and we were generally given enough to do that I could at least pretend that I was distracted from the overwhelming fear and hunger.

“I haven’t been up here since Kittyhawk left us, believe it or not,” Mitraillette said, squeezing into the loft beside me. “Security tightened up after the explosion, so it became harder for us to shelter people, especially after Étienne fell under suspicion. The Germans started watching us pretty closely, the shits.”

She spat onto the floorboards. Then she realized what she had said and looked at me with a touch of guilt.

“Is your brother alive?” I asked her, since at this point I had no idea of what had happened.

“Yeah, more or less.” Mitraillette sighed and told me the whole story. How Étienne had almost been arrested by Ferber and his gang; how the other Ormaie Gestapo officers had defended Thibaut’s earnest fanaticism for the Nazi line, when they were questioned by v.L.’s slightly-more-horrible replacement; and how this had removed the Thibaut family from all suspicion of wrongdoing for good. How the Gestapo eventually decided that the old post office wasn’t large enough for a new Ormaie headquarters, and so decided to keep only a small force in the city and operate mostly from nearby Angers, which allowed everyone in the city a tiny sigh of relief. And also how Étienne was forced to retreat _chez ses parents_ after D-Day, with his tail between his legs and the neighbors not even bothering to hide their scorn, until the French authorities caught up with him.

Like I said, I was strangely relieved to hear that Thibaut was alive, albeit imprisoned. I disliked him for puffing himself up so much over being able to strike fear in his fellow countrymen, and he disliked me for not taking him seriously, no matter how much he puffed himself up. But I guess the fact is that I’m tired of hearing about old acquaintances not having made it through this war, so I’ll welcome news of anyone surviving, even someone I never particularly liked.

“Can I ask you something?” Mitraillette said suddenly, after she had given me a few seconds to mull over Thibaut’s lot in life.

“Of course,” I replied.

“Why did you do it?”

I had to think about it for a little while. It would have been easy to say something like, “It was the right thing to do,” and that wouldn’t have been a lie. But the reason was deeper than that, and I knew that Mitraillette was well aware that it was.

“You have to understand, I didn’t want Germany to lose the war,” I said finally. “But I sure as hell didn’t want Hitler to win it.”

Mitraillette nodded. Then she sighed.

“Ah, it’s all rotten, isn’t it?” she said. “We actually do have cousins in Alsace, and we didn’t hear about it until after the war, but one of the boys enlisted for the German army. He froze to death outside of Leningrad. His brothers were conscripted by the Nazis against their will, and ended up massacring an entire French town. It’s all totally fucked up. I don’t know how they can live with themselves. I don’t know how Étienne can live with himself, either. God knows he’ll always be my brother, but I still believe he deserves every day that he spends in prison, the bastard.”

She slapped her palm against the floor for emphasis, then hoisted herself onto the ladder.

“Come on,” she said as she began climbing back down to the floor of the barn. “We’d better get downstairs and to bed, if you’re going to go see Madame Damask before your bus leaves Tours tomorrow. Papa should have finished fixing your car by now, at any rate.”

Papa Thibaut had indeed fixed the Rosalie and brought it around the back of the barn, and once Mitraillette had made sure that he had, she showed me to Étienne’s room.

“Make yourself at home,” she said to me, fetching my bag from where I’d left it in the kitchen and tossing it on a chair. “Do you need anything, before I go to sleep?"

I shook my head, and then changed my mind.

“Actually, do you have any paper and a pen?”

Mitraillette shrugged brusquely.

“There’s probably some in Étienne’s desk. Feel free to use anything in there. It’s not like he’s going to need any of it, any time soon.”

Poor Mitraillette. For fear of upsetting her further, I said goodnight and sat about for a good half-hour, wondering if I should write a letter to you or to Madame Damask or even to Isolde von Linden, and eventually giving up without writing a word to any of you. But I couldn’t fall asleep, either. It was very strange sleeping in Étienne Thibaut’s childhood bed, especially knowing that Käthe Habicht had lived in this same room, during her brief stay in Ormaie. The air seemed filled with memories that didn’t belong to me.

I must have finally fallen asleep, though, because the next thing I remember is Mitraillette rapping on the door of the room as the sun was only just struggling over the horizon. Maman Thibaut had heated up hot water for a bath, so I washed up and joined the family over a quiet breakfast of eggs and chicken sausage with baguette and jam. It was still pretty chilly outside, but Maman Thibaut thrust two Thermoses of hot chocolate at us before Mitraillette and I loaded ourselves into the Rosalie and set off through the awakening countryside.

“Thank you for waking up so early,” I told her, yawning. “And for taking the time to come with me.”

Mitraillette shrugged and took a swig of her hot chocolate.

“We always wake up this early on the farm,” she said. “And don’t be silly, it’s fun for me to have a bit of a break like this. Amélie is pretty jealous that she has to collect eggs and go to school, while I get to guard you for the day.”

As it was, we only passed by one or two other cars on our drive, and Mitraillette didn’t even feel the need to growl at them. She clearly knew her way around, too, and navigated us to Madame Damask’s house without a single missed turn.

When we arrived outside the gates and I turned off the ignition, Mitraillette immediately leaped out of the car, but I found myself paralyzed.

“Aren’t you coming?” asked Mitraillette, furrowing her brow at me as she rapped on my windowpane with her knuckles.

“I can’t do this,” I muttered to her.

Mitraillette cocked an eyebrow at me in exasperation.

“Really, Anna? You survived bombings and espionage intrigues and God knows what else during the war, and now you’re going to get cold feet over visiting a nice old lady who’s wanted to thank you since 1943?”

She had a point. I tossed back the rest of my hot chocolate and climbed out of the car as Mitraillette strode confidently towards the gates.

It turned out that Mitraillette knew virtually the entire staff on the grounds, from her days of smuggling Résistance fighters in and out of the boathouses. They all seemed glad to see her, in any case, and let us into the gardens without even asking who I was or why I was there. You really must come back when the roses are in bloom, Maddie — it’s impossible to describe how brilliant and fragrant they are, riots of color blazing in the sunshine, laced with dizzying sweetness and the gentle buzz of bees. I could have wandered through the gardens for hours on end and been blissfully content with everything. But when we reached a corner of the garden near the edge of the river, Mitraillette stopped.

“You go on ahead,” she said. “I’ll wait for you over here.”

I nodded and continued forward, until I reached a simple stone laid into the ground on the riverbank, covered with the withered heads of cut damask roses. I knelt down and brushed the shriveled petals aside to read the inscription:

 _ICI RESTENT LA VÉRITÉ ET UNE AUTRE COURAGEUSE_  
_QUI SONT TOMBÉES EN COMBATTANT POUR LA LIBERTÉ  
_ _1 DÉCEMBRE 1943_

Mitraillette must have told them. I traced the letters of _VÉRITÉ_ with a finger and exhaled slowly. And then I sat down on the dirt next to the stone and wrapped my arms around my legs and stared off across the glinting surface of the river, thinking about how lucky I am to be alive after everything I’d seen, and about how unfair life had been to so many people. I don’t know how long it took me to realize that tears were slowly rolling down my cheeks.

I turned when I heard soft footsteps behind me, and there by the stone was Madame Damask. She didn’t even need to introduce herself for me to know that that was who she was. You had it exactly right, Maddie, when you said she was like a person from the previous century, like someone sculpted from porcelain. She wore a broad-brimmed hat, and one arm cradled a bunch of freshly cut roses.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, scrambling to my feet and trying to brush the dirt from my skirt and the tears from my face as best I could.

She regarded me calmly, without any judgment, and then slowly knelt down and placed the roses on the stone. I offered her a hand up, and she took it silently, barely putting any pressure on it as she stood again and let go.

“You have no reason to be sorry,” she said quietly. “Did you know her?”

“Verity. Yes,” I whispered.

Madame Damask nodded, and turned her gaze across the river.

“There are others buried up by the bridge, where the fight occurred,” she explained.

“I know. And I’m sorry about the others, of course, but it was more appropriate to come here. She was the only one I knew.”

My previous sentences had been short enough that these were the first that betrayed a hint of accent. (My French is pretty fluent, but much more accented than my English is.) Madame Damask shot a politely curious look at me.

“You’re not from around here.”

“No,” I agreed, looking across the river so I wouldn’t have to look at her. 

“Ah. They told me she was English.”

“ _Écossaise_ ,” I corrected her before I could stop myself. Scottish. The moment the word was out, I felt my lower lip begin to tremble.

Madame Damask blinked at me.

“And you?”

I pressed my eyes together, willing the tears not to come.

“ _Allemande_ ,” I whispered. German. “I was her guard at the Château de Bordeaux.”

This time, I was acutely aware of my weeping, and I buried my face in my hands. Madame Damask stood beside me in silence for a long moment, and put her hand on my shoulder. When I dared to glance up at her, she was holding out a lace-bordered handkerchief to me, which I took with shaking fingers.

“ _Alors, tu es l’Ange_ ,” she said to me. You are the Angel. I still have no idea if she ever knew my real name. “I have hoped for years that you would come back, so that we could thank you properly. We owe you so much.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I sobbed. “Not compared to what you did. Not compared to what Kittyhawk did. And certainly not compared to what Verity did.”

“We all have our parts to play,” Madame Damask reminded me. “And who knows how many more would be dead, if not for collaborators like you?”

Collaborators like me. _J’étais collaboratrice_. I thought about how the French prisoners had used the term as the ultimate insult, and I smiled to myself.

“Would you tell me about her?” Madame Damask asked me. “Verity? I never had the pleasure of meeting her.”

I stared. Was it really possible that she still hadn’t been told? I know that you and Jamie are bound by the Official Secrets Act, but I guess I had assumed that _surely_ your mother-in-law must have written...

“She was the bravest person I’d ever met,” I said. “She didn’t look like she would be — she was a small, fragile-looking girl, only a bit larger than you are. But she had the spirit of a general or a queen.”

I finally gained enough courage myself to meet Madame Damask’s gaze.

“Not too surprising,” I told her, “when you consider that she was a Wallace and a Stuart.”

Madame Damask said nothing for a long while, only turned her elegant face down towards the stone in silent reflection. 

“You didn’t know?” I asked her softly.

“Not for certain, no,” Madame Damask replied. “Her mother sent me a letter during the war, saying that she had been killed, but never how or where...”

Her voice caught, and for a moment, I stupidly considered handing her back the handkerchief that I’d been using, but she thankfully produced another for herself.

“ _O, ma pauvre Julie_ ,” she said after she’d regained a bit of her composure.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“No, it’s better for me to know.” Madame Damask sighed. “It doesn’t make things any better, but neither does it make things any worse, and at least I can die now knowing the truth _— en sachant la vérité_.” She gave me a searching glance. “How did you know about our connection?” 

“Kittyhawk,” I said. “She was Julie’s best friend; she’s the one who put the pieces together. I just saw her in Scotland, and she sends her regards and her thanks. She’d like to come visit, too, when she’s able.” 

“She will always be welcome,” Madame Damask said warmly.

We stood for a long while side by side, under the branches of a willow tree by the edge of a sparkling river on a sunny day in spring. A faint wind fluttered the petals of the damask roses on the grave. Made me think of a [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ4Egb0LE9E) I once knew about laying flowers on a grave in November and thinking of the dead in memories of May — only for us, the months were reversed.

“We should get going, Anna,” said Mitraillette’s voice softly from behind me.

We turned, and Mitraillette, to my astonishment, curtsied before Madame Damask.

“Thank you for bringing your friend here,” Madame Damask said to Mitraillette, taking her hands. “She has told me something that I needed to know, and I have finally been able to deliver my thanks in person.” To me, she said, “I do not have much to offer you, but please know that we would be happy to have you here, any time you choose to visit. And please take with you any roses that you wish to pick on your way out.”

And with that, she nodded to us and made her way stoically up the riverbank, back towards the house. Mitraillette, meanwhile, had the good sense not to try to pry out of me what I had told Madame Damask, and we walked back through the gardens in silence, the only noise the buzzing of the bees. I considered picking a rose or two, but decided that I would rather leave them where they were, still alive and flourishing in the French soil.

I remained occupied by my own thoughts for the first half of the ride back to the Thibauts’ farm, but then Mitraillette said something to me — can’t remember what now — and before I knew it, we were laughing and chatting about all sorts of nonsense, just two friends out for a drive in the Ormaie countryside. And at some point, it struck me that this is what it felt like to live a normal life, to still experience moments as deliriously carefree as if the war had never happened. That was what I was trying to explain to you and Rosie, after Rosie took me flying, but I didn’t quite have the words to describe the feeling after a rush like that.

Again, miraculously, we reached our destination without anyone trying to arrest me, and I said goodbye to the Thibauts. I was touched by how genuinely sorry they seemed to see me go, I really was. Everyone kept telling me that of course I’d always be welcome if I came back, and who knows, perhaps I will go visit them again someday. (Won’t that be strange, if Étienne is out of prison by the next time I do. Not sure how happy he’d be to see me.) They also asked me to write to you and send you their regards and tell you to go visit them, which I clearly have done — in far more detail than I had intended, given that this was meant to be a quick letter dashed off in Tours, and instead here I am finishing it up at my kitchen table back in Berlin.

That was one other thing about the Thibauts that really struck me. When I somewhat thoughtlessly told them that they’d all be welcome in Berlin if they wanted to come visit, there was only a half-second’s worth of stunned silence before they all started telling me how kind of an offer that was, and how they’d always thought that Berlin sounded like a very culturally rich place. I couldn’t tell you if any of them had ever even been to a city as big as Paris, let alone one that had been the seat of a government that had caused them such pain, but it meant a lot to me that they responded as generously as they did, even if they were just being polite about my hometown for my sake. I can’t imagine my mother or grandmother responding with nearly as much grace to an invitation to visit Moscow, now or ever. I sure as hell wouldn’t go.

The Rosalie made it back to Tours, somehow, and so here I am back at home. Again, I’m so eternally grateful for your hospitality, and for your financing all of the bus tickets necessary for my diplomatic mission between the nations of the Auld Alliance (that really was beyond generous of you, even if I was “acting as your emissary”). I only regret that I had to cut my stay in Scotland a few days short to be able to make it down to Ormaie, but I hope that we see each other again at some point in the future, and of course you and Jamie are just as welcome to visit me in Berlin. I know you both have generally horrible impressions of we Germans, and rightly so; but war brings out the absolute worst in everyone, and I like to believe that, if you did visit, you’d find our country to be filled with people not all that different from the inhabitants of London or Paris. Julie referred to Germany as the “land of poets and thinkers” in her report — it sounds better in the original German, _das Land der Dichter und Denker_  — and after we make the place right again, I hope that that’s how you’ll be able to see it, too.

Many thanks,  
Anna


	6. Anna - Berlin, November 1947

Berlin  
Germany  
  
8\. November 1947

Dear Maddie,

before anything else, my sincere congratulations to you and Jamie! I hope you won’t mind that Rosie shared the good news in her last letter, and I’m so glad to hear that you’re doing well. While I’m not at all surprised by the name you’ve chosen — in fact, I would have been shocked if you’d chosen anything else for a girl — I will confess that I got pretty teary at seeing it written down on paper. I hope to meet her (and Jamie, for that matter) if and when I’m ever able to make it back to Craig Castle, and until then, I hope that you all remain in good health, and that the lads aren’t too put out by how comparatively little attention they’ll be getting from now on.

While I hate to cast a shadow over a joyful occasion, I also wanted to let you know about a more sobering matter. I think I’ve discovered the whereabouts of Isolde von Linden — or, really, some of my acquaintances in the British military with friends in Düsseldorf think they have. It’s not a happy story. The girl they’ve found has been homeless since at least the end of the war, with no known or acknowledged family except for her young child. She has survived by selling herself to soldiers in the streets. They can’t be absolutely sure that she’s Isolde von Linden, but she goes by Brangäne — the name of Isolde’s maid in the opera — and matches the age and physical description that I gave them of von Linden’s daughter. A few of the soldiers who said they knew her mentioned that she sometimes sings to herself softly, when she doesn’t think anyone is listening — tunes from _Lieder_ and Mozart operas. Otherwise, she never says more than a few words to anyone at any given time, always in a whisper and always without making eye contact. They also say that she becomes nearly hysterical upon hearing loud noises, or if someone out of her line of vision touches her unexpectedly, but all in a very quiet manner — violent outbursts of sudden movement, but no screaming or sobbing.

This is horrible of me, but I keep hoping that it isn’t the same person. Of course I’d rather that Isolde were wretched and alive than dignified and dead, but it breaks my heart to think that this is what has become of the poor, cultured, lonely, _innocent_ schoolgirl I met back in what seems like a lifetime ago. The war has obviously taken a toll on all of us, but at least we have had the good fortune to spring back from the worst, surrounded by friends and family, as intact as possible and able to move on with our lives. How irreparable must the damage be to someone who hasn’t had anyone to support her?

In any event, I’ve posted a letter via one of the British chaps and will go to Düsseldorf the next chance I get to see the girl in person. I’ve translated the letter for you below, just so you’ll know what it said. Let me know if you have any thoughts, and of course I’ll tell you anything more that I learn.

Take care,  
Anna

 

_[Letter to Isolde von Linden, translated from the German]_

Dear Isolde,

I don’t know if you’ll remember me, as we met only very briefly about four years ago, when you had just arrived in Düsseldorf. I gave you some things belonging to your father then, and I am writing to you now to tell you that a few more of his possessions from Ormaie survived the war. Six calfskin-bound notebooks that were written by your father and contain descriptions of his work in Ormaie are now in a private library in the United Kingdom. You should be aware that they will tell you some things about your father that you would probably rather not know. But you deserve the full truth after all these years, about who he was and what he did, and these notebooks will give you that, if you choose to seek them out. The owners of the library know that you may go looking for answers someday, and they have already assured me that they will open their home to you, if you do.

I also wanted to say that I am sorry to hear that the past few years have been so difficult for you. Times are just as hard in Berlin as they are in Düsseldorf, but if you feel that it would help you to come back home and re-establish yourself here, then you and your child are welcome to stay with me until you have found your feet. My mother and grandmother, who also live in Berlin, would certainly welcome you with open arms; like me, they have very little to offer in the way of money or food or clothing, but if support and encouragement are enough, then we can give you those easily. I should warn you in advance that my apartment is very small and nothing glamorous, and that there’s just as little to eat here as everywhere else, but I work pretty long hours at the Kammergericht, so you’d have a good amount of privacy — and of course you would be welcome to put whatever you wanted on the gramophone, whenever you wanted.

Please at least let me know that you received this letter. Your father once said while we were in Ormaie that your being in neutral Switzerland kept you _noch im Reich der Sonne_ , still in the realm of the sun, and even if you decide to remain in Düsseldorf, it would be a great comfort to me to know that you were alive and following whatever path seemed best to you. Whether or not that path takes you to Berlin, I wish you nothing but the best, and I hope that we meet again.

Your friend,  
Anna Engel


End file.
